1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of interactive voice response systems and more particularly to a system and method that automatically generates a statistics-gathering application for collecting callback statistics for the voice application thus eliminating the expense and effort of generating a separate statistics subsystem.
2. Description of the Related Art
Statistics gathering is a feature that is desired in most interactive voice applications. These statistics provide useful information that allows the voice application developer to improve upon such features as prompts, help content, grammars, and the overall call flow process. The voice application developer may also use statistics to verify overall system effectiveness and to provide a mechanism to alert the customer that selected call path usage has reached a threshold.
However, current statistic-gathering methods require considerable time, effort, and expense to design, develop, implement and verify. Present statistics-gathering methods must be developed manually by voice application developers, or their subcontractors, and are often considered expensive and a mere afterthought, thus leading to inefficient or ineffective call flow designs. Further, current methods provide a separate statistics-gathering module that is implemented only after the call flow application has been designed. Thus, useful statistical information is not used in the development and revision of the call flow program.
It would be useful to develop an automated, configurable call flow statistics gathering system that would allow the call flow application developer to view and use call flow statistics during the development of the interactive voice application. Such a system can be used to verify the voice application, and aid in System Verification Test and other production environments. Finally, an automated statistics gathering system would eliminate the time and effort associated with the manual development of separate statistics-collection systems, and define a statistics package that can verify its accuracy at every possible call flow path.